Twitter, a message-blasting site rendered infamous by its downtime, is out of service once more. Who killed it? We're blaming Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg.

According to Tweetscan, an independent website which indexes and searches "tweets," the 140-character updates sent by Twitter devotees, the two were discussing Twitter on their ABC talk show, The View, right before Twitter failed.

The outage is unusually severe: Twitter's website is wholly unavailable, unlike past incidents where Twitter displayed an error message known as the "fail whale" for the whimsical cetacean it displayed. Whatever the cause — overcapacity induced by The View's large audience hitting the site all at once, or an inconveniently coincidental outage — it's an embarrassment for a site which had pledged that prolonged outages were a thing of the past.

The last messages displayed before Twitter went down:

Update: Our long national nightmare is over! Sort of. Twitter.com is available again, but the site is displaying the fail whale: